Fallout 4 in the time of COVID19

It’s been a whole year month of working from home, plus a three month week bout of the virus itself. I have been playing video games, mostly FO4, to cope with the stress.

I am on another play through, this time with mods. I loaded some simple ones, like the Unofficial Fallout 4 patch and the Castle Walls Restored mod, which doesn’t really affect game play that much, other than maybe making the castle easier to defend.

The two game-play affecting mods that I have been running are the Everyone’s Best Friend mod, and the Conquest mod.

Everyone’s Best Friend lets you have a companion and Dogmeat at the same time. As companions go Dogmeat isn’t as good as a humanoid. He can’t use a gun, his melee attacks don’t do as much damage, and he can’t carry as much as a humanoid. Also, even though he can’t be killed, I still feel like shit when he gets hurt. According to the mod, a case could be made that Dogmeat was intended to travel alongside a companion, like Meeko from Skyrim. Without the mod, I just place him at Sanctuary or Red Rocket where I presume he gets taken care of by the settlers.

With the Best Friend mod, a humanoid companion, plus the Sentinel add-on, I have a whole entourage accompanying me around the wasteland. Dogmeat serves as the early warning system; He barks when he locates an enemy. Then, Warmachine rushes in once I start shooting. I still get killed on occasion, but for those little encounters with random Raiders or Ferals, it goes a lot faster. Dogmeat’s scouting is important when I put myself and my companion into suits of power armor and then we roll around the Commonwealth with Warmachine like a small bipedal tank division.

I have blown up the Brotherhood and the Institute enough times that it’s not really about the story anymore, it’s more about the Zen of building up the Minutemen and the settlements. In that vein, the Conquest mod makes for an interesting take. Essentially, the mod equips you with a camping kit so that you can create a little settlement anywhere you want. You can create a little cooking stove, a sleeping bag, tent, and a portable generator for hooking up a construction light. It’s a fun little way to rest up, scrap some equipment, without needing to return to a settlement. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s a good way to stay focused on a quest line, and not get pulled into fixing settlement problems all the time.

The other thing that you can construct at a campsite is a workshop that turns the site into a settlement. You can create up to 10 ‘outposts’ this way. I like to create them a couple of miles from my official settlements to act as a kind of overflow area for the busy/happy settlements that reach capacity fairly quickly. Stores at these outposts let you buy and sell, but they don’t produce caps as well as they do at actual settlements, so I skip the General Stores and Bars, which are cash cows for settlements, and stick to weapons vendors so that I can restock on ammo.

As for locations, I like to use existing structures, like Red Rockets. These tend to have workbenches already in place, so mostly I just need to put in beds, crops, and water. If there are beds set up in these places already, they don’t count for the happiness of the settlers.

You also have to build out defenses because they will get attacked, by both the natural spawns in the area and by the random settlement events. I think it’s fun to put them not far from trouble spots, like College Square or the Quincy Ruins. I then tool up settlers before I move them out to the outposts so I can drop by on occasion to watch the fireworks. Another fun thing to do is build the camps on the military checkpoints after the Institute has been defeated. You have settlers standing by to help the Minutemen during their events, and you have Minutemen to help defend the settlers during their events. Also, it feels good, from a role play standpoint, to build more and better defenses and shelters for the Minutemen at the checkpoint. These dudes are just standing around in the elements 24 hours a day, waiting to get roughed up by god knows what.

I am also interested in the Sim Settlements mod, though I haven’t loaded it up yet. My goal is to find create a gameplay experience that is bascially Animal Crossing with guns.